What Mama Couldn't Tell Us About Love: Healing the Emotional Legacy of Racism by Celebrating Our Light

By Brenda Richardson and Dr. Brenda Wade

“A wonderful gift to Black women. . . . Richardson and Wade, with pens dipped in abundant love, gracefully advise us as to the lessons of the past we must embrace and those we must discard, if we are to achieve true self-empowerment and emotional liberation.” — Darlene Clark Hine, Ph.D., coauthor of A Shining Thread of Hope: The History of Black Women in America

In this provocative rethinking of the African American woman's experience, Brenda Lane Richardson and Dr. Brenda Wade ask their Black American sisters to consider this question: "What lessons about love and intimacy were passed down from your foremothers to you?" By exploring the emotional legacy shared by all African American women whose ancestors were enslaved, the authors examine the impact of this history on romantic relationships between today's Black women and men—and reveal how the power of inherited beliefs can both heal and strengthen these bonds.

This remarkably uplifting book will show you how to move toward the emotional freedom you seek. It offers spiritual wisdom from well-known African Americans, ways of enhancing the coping skills and strengths your forebears harnessed to help them survive, and the certainty that emotional emancipation is your birthright. Mama may not have told you all this in so many words—but there is no doubt that she would want you to use the positive messages inherent in the African American experience to create a better life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Oct 13, 2009
• ISBN: 9780061755750

Brenda Richardson

Brenda Lane Richardson, the author of Chesapeake Song, is an award-winning journalist and a noted public speaker. Essence colmnist Dr. Brenda Wade is a clinical psychologist, a well-known television personality, and a popular public speaker who lectures widely across the country.

Book preview

Prologue: A Letter to Mama

Dear Mama:

I’m writing because I didn’t want people to assume from the title of this book that I was dissing you. I’ve written you many letters since that day, more than a decade ago, when you placed a pillow and a blanket on the floor, stretched out on your back, and died. People were amazed at the way you left this world—If she wasn’t sick, how’d she know when she’d die? they asked—but I wasn’t a bit surprised.

You are, after all, the same Mama who at twenty-two bought your first house, a building so antiquated it had no electricity. When you showed my father your acquisition, he thought you were crazy because he didn’t know how to wire no house. Not to worry, you told him, and brandished a flashlight and a book on how to install electricity. Mama, you taught me that we can give ourselves anything we can imagine.

By the time we’d moved to a thirteen-room house in a fashionable neighborhood in Brooklyn, Daddy had taken off, and you were rearing me and my sister on your own. You held down a full-time secretarial job, and you were always dreaming up new pursuits. First, you self-published a book of children’s stories and convinced a chain of five and dime stores to purchase all 10,000 copies. Another time, the phone kept ringing with folks asking for the Able Moving and Storage Company. That night, I told you about all the wrong numbers people had dialed, and you said, Oh, I forgot to tell you, I’ve gone into the moving and storage business. Years later, when my sister and I went to college, decades before there was anything called dance aerobics, you paid our tuition by producing a record that taught people how to dance and lose weight. You wrote the lyrics, rented a recording studio and a band, and, when the vocalist didn’t show, you sang the songs yourself.

Mama, through this and other experiences, you taught me how a black woman could survive and prevail in this world, but only if we are stronger than everyone else. You taught me that no matter how bad the experience, it was to be viewed as a lesson, that every loss should be seen as a gain. You took me right where I should be so I could learn what I had to in this world.

But the one thing I desperately needed that you couldn’t teach me caused you so much pain that, even with your strength, at sixty-four years old you lay down to die. You were so starved for love it must have felt as if the loneliness in your heart would devour you. Your marriages lasted only long enough to teach you that the one thing worse than being lonely is the ache of living with someone without intimacy.

After my father left, when I was eight months old, you waited a while before marrying again. I was five years old when I met your new husband, my Daddy Billy. We moved into a just-built suburban house and our family felt complete. But after three years, when that union failed, there were no good-byes for us. You didn’t tell Billy you were leaving because you didn’t want any trouble out of him. He left for work and then your brother pulled up with a big truck that we all filled with our belongings. Little was left behind besides your note telling Daddy Billy he had ten days to vacate your house. You told me to pretend I’d never met him. Over the years I thought my longing for him had been bled out of me, and yet all these years later when I see a newly built house something tightens in my chest. Your steely determination could regulate every aspect of my life except the chambers of my heart.

Mama, you taught me real good how to leave a man. But because you never learned yourself, you couldn’t teach me how to make love work. Not only could you not teach me to love a man, you couldn’t teach me to love myself because you couldn’t love yourself. I don’t mean any disrespect, Mama, and I worried that you’d think I was somehow looking down on your life. Then I had a dream about wearing your clothes and my concerns were chased away.

In my dream I was walking in a rainstorm, along a road near your childhood home in Holland, Virginia, dressed in your real alligator shoes and one of those fancy sequined dresses you and your girlfriends used to buy when you went searching for Mr. Right. Strangely, I wasn’t troubled about getting filthy and I continued to move easily, even when the dust turned into huge mud puddles that reached to my chin. By the time I arrived at my destination high on a rock looking out over the muddy fields, the dress was ruined, but the emerging sun shone down on your shoes, which were so sparkling clean they seemed illuminated.

When I considered that dream, I knew the rain signified a washing clean, a transformation, and that the sun was God, the giver of light. Later, I understood why your shoes had remained untouched by the mud. Shoes, of course, are made for walking, for moving on. Your message was clear. I don’t have to be stuck in your pattern: looking good outside but feeling empty on the inside. Nor do I have to make a choice, as you had, between having love or being strong. I can have both.

You were right, Mama (and you probably know that). You were smiling fifteen years ago on my wedding day, and I absolutely know you were with me two years ago when, in the middle of a workday, my fax machine went off with a note from my husband. He’d written, I love you and I can’t wait to see you tonight. Reading the note, I could have sworn I heard you shouting "hallelujah!"

I’m saying now what I told you that day. I love you, Mama. Thank you for being the school I was born into, for teaching me to honor God, for supporting me even when I saw things differently from you. You didn’t like it when I talked about slavery. You’d say, Even God can’t change the past. I certainly didn’t know that the past would one day be the key to my healing.

We’ve never known your great-great grandmother, but during one of my healing exercises, I knew I’d come closer to understanding the despair and hopelessness I’d felt concerning my love life when I wrote her a letter. Because I didn’t know her name, I called her Emma and pictured her waking in the slave quarter, starting her day by gritting her teeth, bracing for trouble, and knowing she could expect only two responses from men: The one who was white would rape or beat her; the one who was black would have to look the other way. I asked her about her life and told her about mine, including the lingering grief I have felt over losses she could never mourn. I sobbed as I said her name aloud and thanked her for taking the lash for me, for bearing the pain and then pulling herself up and carrying on. Because Emma refused to give up, I live. Her strength is the jewel of my slave legacy.

When emancipation came, Emma must have continued on even in the face of her depression, exhaustion, and disappointment over her spurious freedom. Surely by then her rage had become a habit. Unknowingly, she passed on to her children her belief in scarcity, her fears about men and love. Her fears about love affected her daughter’s life; yours, Mama; and mine. Now I have children of my own, and in a loud revolutionary voice, I declare to the universe: The pain stops here. Thanks be to God for lasting love.

Your daughter always, BLR

Introduction

"I wouldn’t trade my experiences for anything, as painful as some of them have been. I’m even grateful for the abuse, because it brought me to where I am and made me who I am today."

—OPRAH WINFREY

We open with this quote from Oprah Winfrey, because we too believe that even our most pain-filled experiences are priceless gifts that offer us opportunities to grow and to learn to live abundantly. If we can correctly interpret and resolve our hurtful experiences, we can discover and expand into our highest and best selves. Most of us identify our wrenching experiences as being personal and singular, beginning and ending with our own lives, but we would like to suggest that our most painful experiences are rooted in our history. This is a reality that Oprah Winfrey identified when she first read Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer-prize-winning novel, Beloved. As she has explained, she recognized this work as a turning point in our nation’s coming to terms with our tragic past. Whereas, before, the focus was on the historical details of the slave experience, Beloved forced us to confront what slavery felt like. Ms. Winfrey decided to produce and star in the critically acclaimed film adaptation of Beloved because she recognized that the real legacy of the slave experience is emotional.

The shame that white as well as black people still feel about slavery (because the racism it unleashed continues to haunt us) meant that Ms. Winfrey, one of the most powerful and popular people in the entertainment business, couldn’t convince most of her fans to see Beloved. Long before the movie was made, Toni Morrison said she expected people to resist reading Beloved because the emotional impact of slavery is something black people don’t want to remember, white people don’t want to remember. I mean, it’s national amnesia.¹

While the novel and film adaptation of Beloved were powerful and beautifully rendered, we believe you’ll find that What Mama Couldn’t Tell Us About Love takes a very different approach. We show you how the past can help you in the here and now. We’re certain that you’ll feel empowered as you identify your inherited strengths. You may also feel reluctant about exploring the more hurtful aspects of our history. But turning your back on those feelings would be particularly unfortunate if it means you remain deeply conflicted about the faulty beliefs that evolved during slavery. As you will learn in this book, when we humans feel emotional pain because of events, we often create unconscious beliefs that help us cope. But coping isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. While it’s true that it’s better than giving up, there’s a high price to pay for adaptability. Sometimes people use coping tactics when they’re no longer necessary. Beliefs that were once coping strategies can become burdensome,² and these burdens can affect personal relationships.

People of all races operate on the basis of a belief system made up of familial, cultural, and personal messages, as well as those that can be traced back to specific historical events. As a way of justifying slavery, for instance, many whites developed beliefs about people of African descent, as well as their own place in society, and, consciously as well as unconsciously, passed those messages on to their children, who in turn communicated them to their children, and then onto newly arriving immigrants. Black people are negatively affected by those beliefs—especially the fallacious doctrine of white supremacy—every day. We African Americans have also naturally internalized beliefs about ourselves from that period.

What Mama Couldn’t Tell Us about Love examines our emotional legacy, a legacy of feelings and beliefs that developed from our collective experiences, beginning with the kidnapping of our African ancestors when they were dragged in chains to the New World, and continuing as their descendants suffered through the violence and humiliations of the Jim Crow laws passed across the South around 1914, and latter-day racism. All of this impacted us financially and socially. These historical events, fraught as they were with complex and diverse highs and lows, tragedies and triumphs, have cast a long shadow over our lives. We know that to give and receive love fully demands that we first appreciate our own inner beauty and learn to love ourselves. Yet getting in touch with our true selves, and with the shame, anger, and fear that certain aspects of our history have caused us to feel, can be overwhelmingly difficult. These emotions are connected to grief, and it is grief that keeps people from fully loving and being loved.³ If we are to cherish ourselves and create abundance in our lives, we must allow ourselves to grieve our brutal history and ultimately to make peace with it by embracing its lessons.

Given our history, what is most admirable is that we have retained our great capacity for love, as depicted in songs that top the charts, in poetry, and in novels and films that win us international recognition. Yet in our personal lives, our need for intimacy often goes unfulfilled.

A barrage of statistics indicate that most black women will never have lasting romantic love in their lives. But we believe that for every one of us who is ready for love, there are enough good men who are willing to heal and grow. We believe that God, who is love, wants us to have love in abundance. After all, the Creator wouldn’t give love to some of us and leave the rest of us wanting. The big piece that has been missing for us is an integration of spirituality in areas of our lives that have been deprived. Divine power is real, as so many recent studies on the power of prayer demonstrate. In addition to the spiritual work that we need to do, many of us must examine what we have learned about romantic relationships, sorting through the love lessons passed on to us through the generations.

Although it seemed quite apparent to us that we could gain power by exploring our ancestral legacy, we were initially startled when a few people we knew, and some we didn’t, were opposed to us writing this book. A few of their milder comments included:

Honey, don’t go there.

Why dig up those old bones?

How could my love life be connected to slavery and today’s racism?

We were initially startled by these responses, but on reflection they made sense. After all, many of us go to work each day dressed in our Masters of the Universe suits. We aren’t wearing rags that may be stripped from our breasts by a slaveholder who parades us and our children on an auction block. Yet our unknown great-great grandparents’ shame lives on in our collective memory.⁴ Our history didn’t just happen to a group of anonymous people. These people were our ancestors, and in many respects, they are part of us.

The subject of transmitting intergenerational patterns has been discussed in relation to other groups. In The Dance of Anger, Harriet Lerner examines female patterns in relationships, and in I Don’t Want to Talk about It, Terrence Real demonstrates how depression can be passed on from father to son. The idea that a culture born of the slavery experience has been passed from generation to generation was first suggested by psychiatrists William Grier and Price Cobb in their groundbreaking book, Black Rage, published in 1968. More recently, bell hooks and sex therapist Dr. Gail Elizabeth Wyatt makes the connection. In Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery, hooks connects our difficulties with the art and act of loving to our emotional deprivation and the unending grief resulting from slavery.⁵ In Stolen Women, Dr. Wyatt writes: Given the passage of time, you might assume, African American women should be very different from their ancestors in their vulnerability as members of society. But a group simply cannot walk away from such a systematic assault unscathed, particularly if the assault continues in new ways.⁶

What Mama Couldn’t Tell Us About Love takes this approach a step further. It acknowledges the hidden belief system that grew out of slavery and shows how those beliefs are reinforced, and how they interfere with self-esteem and love. Engaging in this healing program is like getting involved in a diamond excavation; and it’s no coincidence that we use this gem to make our point. The world’s richest diamond fields are in South Africa. Our inner strengths originated with our African ancestors, and like carbon that transforms into diamonds after being subjected to monumental pressure, our ancestral gems lie deep within us. In healing, we remove barriers to love—which are damaging beliefs formed in response to slavery and racism—so we can reveal and polish our jewels to their greatest brilliance.

So we begin by learning from past hurts, reading between the lines of our history. Millions of our people lived and died and had children born into bondage, and after emancipation others suffered through another hundred years of bitter racism. Although the most egregious discrimination declined a few decades ago, racism continues to wear away at us in more subtle forms. This history of loss is part of our emotional and psychic heritage. Slavery set the tone for us to be treated as inferiors, explains Dr. Nancy Boyd-Franklin. She writes: The process of discrimination is evident at all class levels. It does not disappear or lessen with advances in economic status, education, the neighborhood in which one lives, career, or job level.⁷

Over the decades a few whites have altered their appearance in an attempt to look like African Americans so they could study and understand our experience. In one much-discussed case, in 1994, Joshua Soloman, a twenty-year-old white student from the University of Maryland, shaved his head and took doses of a medication that darkened his skin temporarily because he planned to spend several months living as a black man. Soloman said he conducted the experiment because, like many white people, when he heard African Americans complain about racism, he played a sympathetic role, but deep down, I had my suspicions. Wanting to learn the truth, he traveled to Washington, D.C., Atlanta, and Gainesville, Georgia, with plans for eventually heading North. But after a few days, he ended the experiment saying, I just couldn’t take being constantly pounded with hate. It never seemed to stop. Writing of his experience in the Washington Post, Solomon told of store keepers following him around and being rude, of women locking their car doors and rushing into their homes as he innocently passed by, and of whites refusing to give him directions when he tried to find a friend’s apartment.⁸

Soloman’s experiences were corroborated in 1998 by President Clinton’s race advisory board, which reported widespread evidence of white privilege. After fifteen months of study and hundreds of dialogues around the country, the board concluded that white privilege is built into the daily indignities that minorities endure and whites generally do not. They were referring to a world in which we are often unfairly targeted by the police and made to pay more for big-ticket items such as cars, and a country in which the median annual family income for whites is approximately $47,000 versus $26,000 for African Americans.⁹

Dr. Boyd-Franklin would not be surprised by this panel’s findings. She has written: It is difficult to convey fully to someone who has not experienced [it] the insidious, pervasive, and constant impact that racism and discrimination have on the lives of Black people in America today. Both affect a Black person from birth until death and have an impact on every aspect of family life, from child-rearing practices, courtship, and marriage, to male-female roles, self-esteem, and cultural and racial identification. They also influence the way in which Black people relate to each other and to the outside world.¹⁰

Psychologists such as Virginia Satir and Harriet Lerner have recognized that the cumulative effect of unconscious pain can destroy relationships even before they begin. Despite our unwavering belief in these theories, we understand why some of our people may be wary if they misunderstand this book’s message. After all, if we admit there’s room for improvement, that message might be thrown back in our faces, as so much information, valid and fallacious, has been used against us. That was certainly the case in 1965 when future senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report on black Americans was published. The now infamous Moynihan report narrowly focused on our history and portrayed us as pathology-ridden and self-destructive. Our work, which is dramatically different, focuses on our enormous well of inherited strengths and talents and our genius for survival. We acknowledge that, like all human beings, we have issues that require work, and that a lot of those issues relate to our particular history.

Acknowledging that we have any issues at all is taking a risk. Some people might say, We’ve all had hard times; why don’t they get over it? or I always knew black women were hard to get along with. The truth of course is that no one racial group has cornered the market on successful relationships. More than half of all marriages and more than 60 percent of second marriages, regardless of race, end in divorce. We are all looking for ways to make love work. And this year (the last of the millennium) is a time for completing unfinished business—we must be prepared to take some risks.

Like many therapeutic approaches, ours may provoke the resistance that typically comes up when anyone faces pain-filled subconscious issues. This is a normal part of the psychotherapy process. There’s no such thing as confronting inner wounds without also needing to get past the automatic resistance to feeling pain. This is how the subconscious mind attempts to protect us from further suffering. We anticipate this response from black as well as white readers.

Despite any initial discomfort, we urge you to keep reading. Valuable energy and emotional resources are not available to us when kept underground. It’s like dragging around a hundred-pound sack. Life is short, but it can feel excruciatingly long for those who must live without satisfying love. In the healing process, we empty the heavy sack, and as our load gets lighter, our energy is freed up so we can make love work in our lives.

The idea of choosing to live abundantly may even seem frightening. As bell hooks points out, many of us develop coping strategies based on imagining the worst and planning how to survive. She explains that accepting the notion that the world is not an alien place, and that there are enough resources to meet everyone’s needs…demands that we adapt a new mind-set, the belief that despite racism, we can find everything we need to live well in the universe.¹¹

We recognize that many men of our race and both men and women of various races will benefit from reading this book, but we have chosen to speak directly to women like us, whose ancestors were kidnapped and transported to lives of slavery in the United States, the Caribbean, or Latin America. We are also aware that there’s no single kind of black woman. Some of us hail from a long line of successful marriages or have broken through emotional barriers and created happy and satisfying relationships, while others have not. We are all unique individuals who can be found in remote towns in Japan, in corporate offices in major American cities and small towns, in projects not far from luxurious suburbs, on fashion runways in Europe, and on sultry Caribbean islands.

But the millions of descendants of the people stolen from sub-Saharan Africa and transported to countries throughout the Western Hemisphere (and that means most of us) have the experience of racism and oppression in common. One African-Caribbean sister, Ondine, a thirty-five-year-old surgeon who was raised in Haiti, realized how her ancestral history has affected her love life. Divorced from Dan, her husband of two years, Ondine discovered the connection between her marital difficulties and her parents’ move to the United States, which included leaving Ondine, who was six, with her grandmother.

Ondine said, My mother and father left me because they were chasing the American dream of greater material good. They didn’t realize that by leaving me, they were repeating the pattern forced on our enslaved ancestors who were separated from their children. I’ve felt terrible shame about being abandoned. Learning to love myself has been like trying to draw water from a dry well. My parents didn’t love themselves either. My lack of self-love has definitely kept me from forming a healthy relationship. I just wish I had known more about myself and my history before I even looked at a man.

You don’t have to be a child of Mother Africa to identify with the concerns we raise. Women of other races have pointed out that they struggle with many of the same problems; obviously black women haven’t cornered the market on grief. Adult children of immigrants, no matter from which country their ancestors hailed, will find these themes strike a particularly familiar chord. A similar sense of loss may be an enduring part of their consciousness, affecting the way they eat or spend or love or parent. Many white friends and colleagues who have read this work have begun to look closely at the issues in their lives that may be connected to their own ancestral grief. One woman in particular began crying as she recalled that her father experienced bitter discrimination after immigrating to the United States from Italy, and eventually changed his name so that it would not reflect his heritage. He lost his name and any sense of who he was, she said. Adult children of parents who suffered during the Depression may also find scarcity themes familiar as well. But a major premise of our work is that our issues arise from circumstances that are unique.

Certainly other immigrant groups came to this country under severe duress and experienced tremendous prejudice on arrival. But they chose to come here. Moreover, the children of the Italian, Polish, Jewish, and Irish could assimilate into the American culture, and they became white in the eyes of society, whereas our color was used as an excuse for keeping us separate and isolated. Asian groups, despite the prejudice and discrimination they have faced, have found sustenance by being able to retain some of their family structure: customs, languages, and traditions. Irish and Italian people maintained continuity and cohesiveness through the Roman Catholic Church, just as Jewish people did through their culture and religion.¹²

Our ancestors were forcibly brought to a country where their oppressors forbade them to speak their language, practice their customs, or even keep their names. Their family lives, which had been the foundation of their governments and communities, were completely disrupted. Although legally sanctioned discrimination has ended, we have never been fully accepted. Doctors William Grier and Price Cobbs write that the hatred of blacks has been so deeply bound up with being an American that it has been one of the first things new Americans learn.¹³

Their message sounds especially prescient when we hear the advice a U.S. customs clerk recently gave a young woman who was newly arrived from Ethiopia about how to succeed in this country. He told me to stay away from black people, to keep my accent, and never let anyone assume I was a black American, she reports. As African Americans, we have grown up as outsiders in our own land.

Another reason the discrimination we face differs from that experienced

Reviews for What Mama Couldn't Tell Us About Love

[Rachel · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

One of the BEST books I've read on ancestral trauma and how it affects Black American women. Such a game-changer and eye-opener!